Drawing An Obadiah Blank

Over The Moon was one of several studio-bound videotaped shows with human presenters that the BBC introduced into their schedules for younger viewers in the mid-to-late seventies. Like Playboard, Ragtime, Ring-A-Ding!, How Do You Do! and probably also one or two others that even I can't recall off the top of my head, it's not really anywhere near as well remembered as it logically should be.

Other than the possibility that some of the target audience resented anything that wasn't puppet-led, there's not really a readily obvious explanation for this. And that doesn't really work anyway as the Playboard presenter was never actually seen onscreen. Still, as you might have noticed, I tend to use Over The Moon as an example of TV That Time Forgot rather a lot; an example that is slightly undermined by the fact that a lot of people actually do remember something about it, even if they have no idea which programme it came from.

Introduced by an animated question mark/coathanger pin man rebounding off the side of various aspects of nature and industry to a squelchy synth backing, Over The Moon was to all intents and purposes a science show for the under fives. Introduced by the no-nonsense Sam Dale, who conducted very basic sub-Johnny Ball experiments in an equally basic studio set, the show also featured Play School-style filmed inserts illustrating the chosen scientific concept of the week, and a similarly illustrative quirky song set to animation by Pigeon Street designer in waiting Alan Rogers.

What was unusual in Over The Moon's case was that these songs were written and performed by actual singer-songwriters, albeit in most cases with previous links to BBC Children's programmes. As you can imagine, this meant that the songs were usually of a very high standard and indeed were remarkably memorable for such a widely-forgotten show. So much so, in fact, that it's likely that most people who remember the songs have little or no idea of what Over The Moon even was. Notable examples include Kim Goody's lament for Rat Van Winkle, who escaped from the 'Rat Race' to a land where a minute lasted a year, Jasper Carrott's salute to intrepid if unsuccessful wildlife photographer Angus McBluff, and a certain Derek Griffiths number concerning one Obadiah Blank.

This was a chirpy call-and-reseponse number about how we have our lucky stars to thank for Obadiah Blank, an indefatigable inventor whose achievements included devising the flying spoon and growing poppies on the moon; and ultimately an 'inventing machine', which could go on inventing for him while he sat back and, presumably, counted his own lucky stars. And it's very clearly the most well remembered detail about Over The Moon; any time that I mention the programme anywhere, you can guarantee that someone will ask if anyone else remembers the song, and more or less every reference to 'Obadiah Blank' on the Internet - apart from an article written by me - is someone asking what programme it came from and where they can get hold of it. It seems that a lot of people would like to see it again, in fact. But there's a slight problem with that.

Wheels And Wires, the edition of Over The Moon featuring the Obadiah Blank song, was first shown by BBC1 on 20th December 1978, and last seen 23rd June 1982. Needless to say, it was repeated countless times in the interim. Unfortunately the master tape was lost in the early nineties - if you want to know how and why this happened, then you can read more about that in this post here - and while a filmed insert from the show apparently does still exist, it's not clear as to whether this is Obadiah Blank or the live action sciencey bit. Or both, in fact, but anyway. So many people recall the song so vividly that somebody must have kept a copy of it, even if it's just a crumbly audio recording made by holding a built-in tape recorder microphone up to the television speaker.

So if you do have a recording of the Obadiah Blank song - or anything of Over The Moon in fact, as there's a few of them missing - please let me know. If we can find lost episodes of How Do You Do!, we can find this...

UPDATE! Thanks to Hidden Cam Studios, here's the full Obadiah Blank song as featured in an edition of Play School!!

The Top Ten Most Least Best Worst Underrated Overrated Up And Down In And Out Round About Eeny Meeny Macka Racka Rare Are Dominacka Shickeypoppa Dickywhoppa Om Pom Stick TV Programmes In The World... Ever!

The Guardian has recently caused something of a stir with their rundown of 'TV's Most Criminally Overrated Shows'. If you've not read it, this basically reduces down to a list of ten relatively recent critical favourites, each unflinchingly 'debunked' by a columnist saying little more than 'my friends all liked it but when I watched it I didn't!!'. Meanwhile, quite what criminality is involved here is sadly not clarified.

The correct response to this and indeed anything like this, of course, is to ignore it as lazy 'outrage'-courting clickbait nonsense of the first order and just get on with holding your own opinion on the criminal overratees. After all, even if you find This Is England to be patronising misery-porn with distractingly glaring chronological inaccuracies, are bored senseless by The Walking Dead's 'edgy' rehashing of cliches that you saw in a million straight-to-video epics back when 'zombies' weren't quite so trendy, want to punch everyone involved in Lost for their smugness over that weak lemon drink con-trick of an ending, and aren't even entirely sure of what Downton Abbey actually is, you should at least be able to concede that this is entirely a matter of personal preference and that they are all genuinely in the top ten percent of television made in the digital age (if not ever in some cases), and on top of everything else should simply be able to come up with a better argument.

Except that they've now chosen to follow it up with a list of 'TV's Most Underrated Shows' - essentially a collection of uber-hip programmes that their friends haven't discovered yet and so are presumably OK to like, punctuated by Top Gear which at least gets talked about more than practically any other current TV show, and Time Trumpet, a misfiring sketch show that even hardcore fans of the participants would be hard pushed to describe as anything stronger than 'quite good'. True, you would hardly expect such a list to feature Colour Me Pop, The Secret Service, Ask The Family and Rik Mayall Presents, and indeed nor should it. There's not even anything particularly wrong with the majority of the actual choices on either list, just the smug, mock-'iconoclastic', I'm-in-a-secret-club-and-you're-not attitude underpinning the entire venture. Nobody needs to be told off for watching or not watching something. Unless it's Captain Butler.

Yes, that's all very well and good, as some shirty individual is probably already saying on Twitter, but I didn't like Mad Men either!!!!!8 so what are you going to about it eh eh? Well nothing, frankly, other than to suggest that maybe you read the first three paragraphs again. This has started off an interesting train of thought, though - what are the ten most popular programmes ever covered on here, and what do they say about what people really think is over-and-underrated in television? Probably very little if we're being honest about it, but you're getting that top ten and you're liking it. Doctor Who has been left out, though, as it quite obviously eclipses anything else by a long margin. Anyway, we're starting somewhat inevitably with...


10. Skiboy

Amazingly, when my feature on Skiboy first went up, there were quite a few accusations that it was all an elaborate hoax. Some suggested it might have been some kind of sophisticated satirical prank on the obscurer-than-thou element of archive TV enthusiasm, while others even named a couple of likely-sounding films that I might have lifted screengrabs from and pulled off some convincing Photoshop trickery. But no, it's a series as real as they come, and one that for all its flaws and ridiculousness I would love to see released on DVD in full; it's certainly more underrated than sodding Treme. And judging by the number of hits it continues to get, I'm not the only one.


9. This Life

A surprisingly high entry, given than on the whole posts about more 'modern' stuff never do even half as well, and that these days This Life seems to get at best written off as self-conscuiously trendy 'of its time' fluff and at worst to blame for any given malaise currently afflicting the broadcast industry. But within minutes of going live the link was being shared like crazy - certainly faster and more enthusiastically than the Ask The Family piece - which suggests that there's a silent majority out there who actually quite like it and aren't ashamed to say so. This Life probably wasn't too far away from that 'Most Overrated Shows' list. To which we say yah boo sucks, frankly.


8. Rentasanta

The week of in-depth features on seventies Children's BBC Christmas Specials was a huge success all round (well, apart from the one on Bod for some reason), and it's a format that's probably worth revisiting. But for some reason, the one about the little-seen feature-length Rentaghost Christmas Special went way beyond all the others, and is still hovering inside the top ten most viewed posts each week even now. Part of this can be explained by someone noticing that some of the panto costumes were actually recycled from Doctor Who And The Robots Of Death, but beyond that, presumably people just didn't remember it and REALLY wanted to know where Dobbin came from.


7. Buzzfax

This was actually technically the first part of an epic-length look at the Battle Of The Planets two-parter The Fierce Flowers, but the huge drop-off when it came to the (actually impressively viewed in themselves) instalments proper points towards it being the weird one-week-only Ceefax Linking Saturday Morning TV experiment that everyone was really interested in. There's probably a serious point to be made here about how these sort of odd one-offs were both more likely to get through and indeed more likely to be remembered in a pre-multichannel/streaming landscape, but probably everyone would just get huffy that you were dissing Joss Whedon or something.


6. Orbiter X

Not strictly a TV programme - well, not actually a TV programme at all - but the response to a bit of background detail on a creaky old radio serial that I thought only I was listening to was little short of phenomenal, widely shared and even picked up on by a couple of academic and archive literature sites. I'd deliberately tried to make it more than just a 'review' and give as much of a feel to the information on the context and production of the show as to the descriptions of the show itself, and this must presumably have struck some sort of a chord with people. I'd very much like to do more about forgotten old radio on here so this is a good incentive.


5. Days Like These

It took a long time to put together a decent comparison of the first episode of That 70s Show with its tepid point-missing ITV remake, and it first it seemed that this might have been wasted effort. Nobody really appeared to be that interested, and it was rapidly eclipsed by a jokey look at a couple of Doctor Who clippings from Radio Times that went up shortly afterwards. However it eventually took off and even Days Like These scriptwriter Sam Bain got in touch to say he'd enjoyed it. As an attempt to look at why a notorious TV flop didn't work rather than just sneering, I'm quite proud of it I have to say. But please don't try rehabilitating Days Like These.


4. The Mersey Pirate

For reasons that will become obvious if you scroll back a couple of posts, this look at the strange story behind ITV's most ill-advised idea for a Saturday Morning show ever wasn't exactly written in the brightest and most upbeat of circumstances, but in some ways that made me more determined than ever to turn it into an interesting and amusing account and I'd like to think that the staggering popularity it met with reflected this. Identifying which actual ferry Gerry Marsden was on in which promo film is probably verging on madness, but it's also the sort of detail that people seem to enjoy and which really gives an extra sense of depth. Yes, depth and The Mersey Pirate in the same sentence...


3. How Do You Do!

When I announced that I'd found some wiped episodes of this long-forgotten BBC children's show, some prat decided for no obvious reason that this meant I had found Doctor Who And The Power Of The Daleks and went around saying as such on various sodding forums, leading to badmouthing and threats when the 'truth' emerged. Other more general archive TV enthusiasts were unstinting in their gratitude. And then there were the massive number of teary-eyed late thirtysomethings who got in touch to thank me for letting them see Carmen, Greg and Miss King's Class again. Happy to be of service to all of you, including the mad Doctor Who fans.


2. Play School

Perhaps a bit of an obvious one, and also it's a 'score' based on a couple of posts combined (though even separately they'd still sneak into this list), but there's no getting away from the fact that both the look at the Christmas Eve edition from 1970 and the complete rundown of Play School and Play Away albums attracted massive interest from the off, as indeed did my trivia-drenched live-Tweeting of that edition that BBC4 repeated recently. While we really shouldn't be encouraging Hamble, perhaps this is an indication that Play School is a programme that the BBC really ought to be doing more to exploit?


1. Hardwicke House

Well, it looks as though more people want to see ITV's notoriously banned sitcom than perhaps anyone had expected. This is certainly true if you look at the sheer number of sites that have copied the content of my Hardwicke House pieces uncredited - only with more italics and exclamation marks! Scandalously, of course, it's still not available for ridiculous and quite possibly spurious reasons, which you can read more about here. And I say again, you may find my obsession with this show baffling (though I'm clearly not alone), but what possible good is being done for anyone by continuing to withhold it. There's your entire overrated, underrated, good, bad, best, worst list right there, Grauniad!


Although, as we've already established, there is one individual, whose many and varied adventures across time and space would apear, in terms of popularity at least, to have no equal:

Hang on a minute... Parky? What's he doing here?!

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You can hear me talking to writer Rae Earl about Battle Of The Planets in an edition of Looks Unfamiliar here.

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You can find more about Hardwicke House, Battle Of The Planets, Days Like These and Skiboy in The Camberwick Green Procrastination Society, available in paperback here, from the Kindle Store here, or as a full-colour eBook here.

How Do You Do!

Some of you, if you've been following my ramblings for a while, might well be aware that I have a keen interest in 'lost' programmes from the sixties, seventies and even the eighties. Most of you, however, won't be aware that I've actually found quite a few previously 'lost' programmes myself. That's because these have mostly been recoveries of missing radio shows, and they never really get the same sort of attention that wiped television does.

In fairness, most people probably don't even realise that there actually is any missing radio; and to be honest I didn't either until I started research for my books about Radio 1 comedy Fun At One, and discovered that there were a lot of surprising gaps in surprising places. Many of said gaps have since been plugged, and while I'm not that into blowing my own trumpet, it's fair to say that the schedule for Radio 4Extra's 'Comedy Controller' slot might be even more repetitive still without a couple of bits and pieces that I've tracked down and returned to the archives.

On a handful of occasions, I've also been involved to varying - and mostly tangential - extents with the recovery of lost TV shows. Rather than liberated from far-flung film libraries or spotted on a table at a car boot sale, however, these have all been recovered from early off-air recordings, usually made and kept by someone who had no idea of their rarity or value; sometimes even the people involved in the shows haven't been aware that they are in possession of potentially the only copy in existence. This has included a couple of notable comedy shows and one very notable pop music show indeed, but I've rarely ever discussed any of this as, seeing as I wasn't actually the person who negotiated a loan of the tapes and then spent hours painstakingly retrieving a watchable copy from the fragile recording on an obsolete format, I don't feel that I really deserve credit for their recovery.

However, this time it's a bit different...

One area of the BBC's archive where there are substantial gaps, though you may not necessarily be aware of this, is in late seventies and early eighties children's television. Cutting a very long story very short indeed, this was the result of a project to digitise the archives around the late eighties/early nineties, and a corresponding shortfall in funding that meant that not everything could be transferred. The tapes that had fallen outside the allocated budget were offered to the BFI, who took what they could but unfortunately had neither the space nor the resources to take everything. The upshot of this was that a difficult decision was taken to jettison huge swathes of formulaic shows with little percieved repeat value, where it was felt at the time that a couple of representative examples might be all that anyone ever needed. A definition that somehow didn't quite manage to extend to EastEnders.

As you can imagine, Children's Television was particularly badly affected by this decision, and large numbers of editions of the likes of Swap Shop, Cheggers Plays Pop, Ragtime and Jackanory Playhouse were consigned to archival oblivion. In fairness, however, a significant number were also kept, and if you want to start blaming anyone, look instead to the 'money men', the middle-managers, and that blue sky thinking-obsessed prat at the top of the bureaucracy-addled tree. Also, despite wild rumours to the contrary, this wasn't adopted as a long-term wipe-crazy policy, and no matter what Stewart Lee might vaguely suggest, all of This Morning With Richard Not Judy is still present and correct. It's not on DVD, though, but that's another story.

Anyway, since the realisation sank in that this might possibly have been something of an error of judgement, there have been a number of recoveries and often even in broadcast quality too; notably there are now complete runs of Rentaghost and the extended Alberto Frog-equipped editions of Bod in existence. But when it came to the more obscure and less well-remembered shows affected by the decision, was there any hope of ever finding any lost episodes? Would anyone really have kept any off-airs of long-forgotten science-for-under-fives show Over The Moon?

Well, that's a question that I've been keeping very much in mind while working on an ongoing project that has involved chatting to quite a few people who were involved with BBC Children's Television around this time. Wherever possible, I've taken the opportunity to ask cast and crew members if they might still have a couple of VHSes (or even Betamaxes) of their television appearances knocking around. Sadly most have drawn a blank, and a couple of others are sure they do but so far haven't been able to turn anything up; more often than not, any such tapes will be in boxes behind tons of other boxes in attics rather than neatly filed and proudly displayed on the mantelpiece. More recently, though, I turned my attention to a show called How Do You Do!.

For the benefit of anyone who doesn't remember it - and I'd wager that's the vast majority of the people reading this - How Do You Do! made its debut in the BBC's traditional 'Watch With Mother' lunchtime slot in 1977. Created by Play School presenter Carole Ward, and representing an early and surprisingly subtle move to acknowledge multiculturalism, each edition featured presenters Carmen Munro and Greg Knowles playing counting and rhyming games, and a story - drawn by Joe creator Joan Hickson - about the hip and liberated pre-school teacher Miss King and her diverse class of charges; snooty Caroline, timid Mary, practical Tony, moody Scott, worryingly surreal twins Annie and Louise, outgoing George, quietly cheerful Kevin, tomboy space cadet Sandra, and Cheng, who didn't speak much English but was keen to learn. The thirteen episodes of How Do You Do! were repeated a staggering number of times up to 1981 - surviving for a while into the rebranding of the timeslot as 'See Saw' - but by the end of the decade there were only seven of them left.

Recently, I was lucky enough to be able have a bit of a chat with Greg Knowles, who aside from providing me with all manner of fascinating background details on the production of this little-documented show, also mentioned in passing that he still had quite a few episodes of How Do You Do! on video. Needless to say, I was somewhat excited by this; as indeed was Greg, who had no idea that the series was no longer intact in the archives. I quickly arranged for copies, and sat down to watch them, hoping that they wouldn't just be the seven extant ones. And, as luck would have it, three of them weren't, and copies of Counting Time, Finding Out and Baby Sitting in full and in surprisingly good quality are currently winging their way back to the archives. Suddenly we've gone from seven existing episodes to ten and it all feels a lot less incomplete. And I haven't even spoken to everyone involved in the show yet.

Some people are probably reading this and scoffing that this is a rather trivial find compared to, say, A Madhouse On Castle Street, Doctor Who And The Macra Terror or The Beatles on Juke Box Jury. Which is quite possibly true from a cultural or mass popularity point of view, but in its own way, this is every bit as important a find as anything more high profile. Like so many other unlikely recoveries in recent years of shows that were thought to be lost forever, it proves beyond all doubt that even the most obscure and unlikely programme shown after the arrival of home video might still be out there somewhere. So if you've got any more off-airs of How Do You Do!, please let me know. Or Playboard. Or Ragtime. Or Take Hart, Play School, Play Away, Why Don't You?, Over The Moon, Swap Shop, Saturday Superstore, Get Set For Summer, Cheggers Plays Pop, Ring-A-Ding, Lucky Numbers, Screen Test, Star Turn Challenge, Play Chess, Chock-A-Block, Animal Magic, The Adventure Game, Jackanory Playhouse...

You can find features on many more obscure and long-forgotten programmes, including my top ten of The TV That Time Forgot, in my book Not On Your Telly.